Leaderboard Zone

It keeps coming. PubSub is a RSS-based aggregator that allows you to sign up for search-term-based alerts, then emails you (or updates your RSS reader) when something is posted that matches your search. Signing up is painless, as it should be. It’s Google News Alerts for the RSS-osphere. Cool. Does Feedster or T’rati do this? I am starting to feel like keeping up with this stuff is a full time job. Man, we need a publication covering just this space…thanks to Dave Winer for the pointer.

I guess that depends on what your definition of “painless” is. Signing up to get a Feedster search delivered as RSS : run the search once, then click the name of your aggregator in one of our quicksub menus. Signing up to get a PubSub search delivered as RSS: submit your email address and then answer a confirmation email in order to find out the URL to subscribe to–all this before you see the result of a single search. If you want Feedster search results delivered by email, a couple of the aggregators on our quicksub list offer that service.

I’ve set up some parallel search feeds from both PubSub and Feedster; it will be interesting to see which delivers more/higher quality results. Filtered feeds like this have the potential to significantly alter the power-law distribution of blogs that’s heavily discussed over on Corante amongst many others. It’ll be interesting to watch how this space develops. Meanwhile, congratulations to PubSub for getting their site up and running!